—
we are not [ listening ] where does memory hide. It comes early and we are late. It takes us and wrecks us. Dust. Ash. Rubble. All to moss. We are not

it is a matter of attention and memory in this quiet place that neither you nor I know. Such richness we destroy. Dust passes through our hands. We are lost. Lost for a sense of never quite becoming and we shall never know.

this is the land we cannot forget. Everything underfoot has a name. Is named. Each anonymous grass, repeats a history. I gather your fragments and store them in the pocket of my man made smock. To be an imitation, to cover the old façade with breezeblock and stop it from telling any secrets.
with measured steps, with deliberation, to walk a quiet path, between time and the grey fold. Hide me here, and I will sit, naked and think of marble and skin. Whose voice is this, beneath the shoals of our measured steps, the ship wreck of ambiguity, I am clutching at you, you fall, out, and out back to the place.
[my] deepest breath will bring no more air, the walls are departed, where does memory hide, what do these walls contain. The tree speaks, enlarged and bulbous with such acquisition. I will not beg you, the soil wraps me, the sky melts in hot pool of darkness. Unclench your teeth and loosen your jaw, do you continually bare this need, are you entertainment, clap, clap your hands.

Tell me a secret.

where are you. the stars have broken into pieces and they still clap. The man has no voice and he does not speak my name. The stars in spasm, the stars in cloud are still present. Do not touch this memory. My flesh crawls with it. Writhing in pastness and forgotten intimacies.

The candles have all burnt down and the palace falls to moss and ruin. Who are you. I walk beside the swing of your pulse and your heart pumps in both directions at once, the lines of my body and your heart, does memory have soul. The construction will not cease to frown. The asphalt courses through thick blood, progress will stop nothing . I breathe cement.

[my] self falls into marble and the crowds relinquish. This show has always been over. The hill takes me and the sky hits me. Where does memory hide. The man sits against the fresco and rubs it off with his nylon shirt. This is where the heart is.

” Into the silence, which was also at times a roar, of my thoughts and questions forever returning to myself to search there for an explanation for my life and its purpose, into this concentrated tiny hub of dense silent noise.
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.”

I asked the city to dance with me on a tuesday afternoon.

How can I walk there

In this intensive eight day residency working with memory, cultural history, movement mapping, writing, exploring and finding ways to understand place through oral history, collected narrative and embodied urban mapping.

I would like to thank you Ashleigh Griffith, Cara Davies and Aaron James and Groundwork: Tracing the Pathway Project. Thanks also to Deirdre and Mike at Fulwell Court, and all at MK Arts Centre for all the support.

études en bleu is an on going collaboration I am making with the colour Blue.

Working with landscape, improvisation, body and mind, I am studying through movement what the colour Blue might mean to me.

bleu nu | Dans le sillage du printemps
For no one really knows what a colour is
where it is
or
whether it is.
{ can it die, does it have a heart }
What if I told you I had fallen in love with a colour?
I shall speak this as a confession.
A spell I have fought to stay under and fought to get from under
in turns.
But what kind of love really is it?
Do not fool yourself and call it sublimity.
I am to be not a student of longing, but of light.
dans la mémoire
dans l’espérance

bleu neu [ étude ii ]

l’échec de langauge.
une complainte de mots
les mots partent et la scène est laissé à nu.
le cœur bat.
les supports de souffle.
I continue to fool myself with the affects of language.
The word.
The empty white paper.
waits
for me.
yet I cannot enter the space it lays bare.
The words are left cold.
Alone on the page.

bleu neu [ étude iii ]
– mais que faire si la pluie se dissout tous les mots –
Music by:
Dakota Suite & Emanuele Errante – The North Green Down – A Worn Out Life (With Cello) – (lidar productions)
—
Perhaps all words will be dissolved by the rain.
How cold the fingers in the snow.
How cold the heart.
The words are falling and melting, fleeting as the snow.
The wind wishes to take them all away.
She can no longer say no.
How quickly the words take to the wind. Flight and abandon.
She sits nursing the empty white pages where the words used to play.
—
la page est laissée vide.
Mais que faire si il ne existe qu’un seul mot.
Le papier se envole dans le vent.
—

—
i take a book for a walk
i imagine it may say a word to me
it says nothing
no words
it watches me
the pages stare.
the words race then to the sky
leaving me quite alone.
between the spaces the words leave
there can be silence
as the words take to the wind
—
‘ The old man closed his eyes
and held his gift close to his heart,
” I have danced in the dream world
and danced in the dead world.
My past is now my present
which is now my future.
I am an old man
and I am a life time
of childrens songs.
I am gone.
There is no time in space
only movement and silence
and cold.
The universe rolls..
a great surging tide
of enormous size.
You will become
a white ball of light
forever, within the
boundaries of the freedom of silence. ‘
( M. Robinson)
—-
The words are still in the wind
I will see if my net can catch
even one
so i might hold it in
my hand.
——

bleu nue [ étude v ]
Music: The Tumbled Sea: Melody III
—
The hawk and the fish.
the water and the words.
The body and the earth
sun and the mud under my fingernails
Perhaps you are here.
Perhaps you are hiding in the trees.
—
perhaps all the words which I lost are hiding the trees.
the river takes all the words away.
the sun’s glare take all their sadness
the words are seeking a peace
that the trees conceal.
—
In memory 6 | 2 | 14

The body is a microcosm of the earth
The processes of nature are guidelines to aesthetics
Nature is a healer.

To live the experience of nature,
We are dancing the circle,
With no beginning and no end,
Yet we will begin and we will end,
But in our ability to perceive as such may be faulted and limit us.

We can dance the earth with the earth.

Our breathing mirrors the winds of the world,

Our metabolism akin to fire,

When we take in nourishment, we make a little fire inside of ourselves,

We assimilate,

Our skin constantly renews and sheds,

As leaves falling each autumn,

Our body’s move and change in cyclic ways,

Just as and with the earth,

And just as the earth, we cycle between lightness and dark,

The seasons, the day and the night

Akin to each soul.

Let the image of bird come.

let the image of an animal come.

Let the image of float,

softly softly,

The duet of body and earth.

A constant,

How little do we tune?

Each foot step a new duet.

‘ To be in conversation is surely to live in the open.

To be in conversation is to think and feel on your feet and not to speak of prepared positions.

To be in conversation is to be who you are as who you are. It is to live in what is not yet in the other

And what they are leading you to.

It is when centers meet that the world is changed.

To live in serious conversation is to live with the converse

To live in and with the contradiction

With opposites

With the other than we are

To be a place of meeting

Not a place of judgment.

To be in conversation is to enter into what flows

In and amongst and between you.

To be present in conversation is to speak of and speak to

the world

now.’

(Mair. M. Between Thee and Me.)

Be still.. breathe.

let go, the need to do anything.

sense stillness, emptiness, at the bottom of the breath,

Pause in the turning moment, between one breath and the next,

Open the inside of the body,

Open the pathways of bone, open the skin,

let the body spread open like a sail to the wind.

Move into the spaces in and around the body.

Sense endings and beginnings.

Sense the possibility of movement.

Interval, silence, emptiness.

Listen to the space between one moment and the next.

Let the body breathe, make room,

sense the body.

Sense the horizon.

‘ Listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms out of silence.’

( Rilke)

“ Everything that gives light is dependent on something to which it clings, in order that it may continue to shine. Thus, sun and moon cling to heaven, and grain, grass and trees cling to earth.’ (I Ching)

‘ To dance is human, and humanity almost universally expresses itself in dance. Dance interweaves with other aspects of human life, such as communication and learning, belief systems, social realizations and political dynamics, loving and fighting, and urbanization and change, and evolutionary development of the human species. When dance is surprised for moral, religious or political reasons, it raises, phoenix like to assert the essence of humanity. Dance appears primary among aesthetic forms and, the instrument of dance, the human body, contributes to other forms, which use its spatial, temporal and kinetic elements. Such dance dynamics preserve in the broad spectrum of non dance aesthetic phenomena.’ Hanna. L. J (1979) To Dance is Human

sometimes when I close my eyes i can listen to the chatter of the spiders as they weave their webs before dawn

to be like a tree. is impossible but as a human i can reflect on my interpretation of what sensing a tree might appear as this may not be apparent to anyone other than myself perhaps i do not need to share this detail

the experience of standing in the rain under a treeI am breathing in I am breathing out.

once upon a time;

only time for those moments did not exist,
and the clocks had all stopped
and the compass was stuckand we were here
the walls ran with water

we are here

the morning lays in waitthe lark promises.

what enchants and and what excites?

the images are falling.

our hands met in mud.

a chello on a hill

the performance of taking an ice cold bath

counting the ravens

a marching band follows you.

to texture and scent.

far from the widening field in a narrow town street

that is where we began
you with a broken branch
time space energy direction

to give each other attentionto listen to each sound

the film breathes in and out
the film coils and turns in on itself
it begins to die
the maker watches
the pen out of inkthe images will all fade

making the transition into the light and into the dark
accepting that both states can be present
and absent

and when i dancei am almost human again
all the emotion comes flooding back
and back and back
and moss listens
a wild rush
a stream
a waterfall

and I stand still.

still.But then I realise even my blood is dancing.

there can be no stillness.

perhaps this is all we need.
the ferns sing a lament
to the fading sky and the rains march in
the scene is flooded and the mosscatches the tears.

Explorations of Gleann Eatharla ( November 2014) with special thanks to Jynx for such hospitality and kindness.

As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills.

to the endangered and vanished ones.

To hold memory

and let it fall.

To hold dust and let the wind take it.

to press a cold rock against my lips

to stick my tongue out into the rain

to get my feet so wet i can no longer feel them

to press my spine against a tree

to mould myself into sand

How to become a part of this earth

the metal compositions of blood

rust, skin, iron, bone.

rot, decay, birth and growth.

the gift of pen and paper

the gift of a seed.

‘Humans are tuned for relationships. The eyes, the skin, the ears, the tongue and nostril , all are gates where our body receives nourishment of otherness. The landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams, these breathing shapes, our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.

The colour of the sky, the rush of waves- every aspect of sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger.

Every sound was voice. every scrape, every blunder was a meeting – with Thunder, with oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.

As humans we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body. we live in our bodies and so know. from within the possibilities of our form. We cannot know with the same familiarity or intimacy, the livd experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of humming bird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. And yet we do know how it feels to sip from a fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun. Our experience may indeed be a variant of these modes of sensitivity, never the less we cannot as humans, précisely experience the living sensations of another,

We do not know with full clarity. their desires and motivations, we cannot know. and can never be sure that we know what they know. ‘

‘From the tree of life
leaf after leaf falls around me
Oh world delighted with ecstasy,
How you fill me at last,
How you fill me with weariness
and make me drunk !
Whatever still glows today
is soon lost’ ( Hesse)